Envelope Journaling results in blank recipients - dont panic !
If you have implemented Exchange 2003 envelope journaling , then you may find this issue interesting.
When you change the JournalRecipient mailbox on your recipents' stores, you may notice that some envelope journal reports contain a blank recipient list. Exchange has not gone wild on your regulatory compliance designs. Dont panic :-).
You may observe multiple copies of envelope journal messages being generated between teh old and newly assigned journal mailbox. Some will contain the blank recipient list in the envelope journal report, but at least one will contain the full list of all recipient that received the message. So there is no data loss here.
What you're seeing is essentially a 15 minute configuration TTL lag in Active Directory. Basically, this issue rectifies itself in ~ 15 or less. Within this time period, your Exchange server has knowledge of your old journalRecipient mailbox and the newly assigned journalRecipient mailbox.
The blank report section of the envelope journal message may resemble this:
Sender: "Jane Doe" <smtp:JaneDoe@contoso.com>
Message-ID: <2006xxxyyyyzzzz0@server.contoso.com>
Recipients:
A normal envelope journal report should look like: a message from Jane Doe to John Doe
Sender: "Jane Doe" <smtp:JaneDoe@contoso.com>
Message-ID: <2006xxxyyyyzzzz0@server.contoso.com>
Recipients:
"John Doe" JohnDoe@contoso.org
Ensure that your old journalmailbox is still active for at least 15 minutes when you assign a new journal mailbox to receive the archived emails. Another way to mitigate this 15 minute lag, is to pause the SMTP virtual server on the journal mailbox server. This causes the server to not receive inbound mail from other servers, but continue to process outbound and messages already in progress. After this time, can then allow mailbox servers or internet bridgeheads to send archived messages onwards to the journal server.
